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The ideal viewport doesn't exist

viewports.fyi

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Re: The ideal viewport doesn't exist

#111

Post by eternityforest »

esdott wrote: post #95

For those who think that you can simply build something “fluid” or “flexible,” it’s a lot harder than it seems. A lot of the industry jargon comes from print and the printing process; margins, padding, kerning, spacing, etc. There is no such thing as a fluid layout on a printing press (as far as I know :-). So we are stuck with a language to describe design based on a different era. Additionally, in the design phase…

If you learn non fluid design first it seems hard. In absolute terms, it's really just a matter of using flexbox and percents, and being willing to just scrap your design idea and do something else if it doesn't map nicely to something fluid.

Client education is a challenge and all, they often have ideas in mind that are very specific (For some reason clients invariably like the simplest thing that's the least general and most direct of a translation from a basic analog system...). But on the technical side... once you stop making designs that rely on being able to control exactly where everything goes it gets a lot easier.

Re: The ideal viewport doesn't exist

#112

Post by agos »

lucideer wrote: post #42

There's an elephant in the room here, and it's Adobe. The author's put forward a lot of valid criticisms of the breakpoint-based approach & also provided a really good guide to doing proper web design, but what's skipped over is that their guide only works for developer-designers, & won't fit the workflow of a large proportion (majority?) of people doing visual design for web. Those designers are have backgrounds in…

I've started doing frontend work back in 2008, and I immediately noticed the friction with designers coming from Adobe tools and their equivalents. It's disheartening to see that 15 years later the problem is still there

Re: The ideal viewport doesn't exist

#114

Post by zimpenfish »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #93
5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #15

> "The main point we’re trying to get across is that you simply do not know how users are going to visit your website or web app. Instead of making design decisions on strict, limited breakpoints, keep in mind the sheer amount of fragmentation there is in viewports." I don't know how useful this is. setting breakpoints allows some sanity in the build and testing process otherwise you have an infinite scope for issues…

> and dont do stuff like hijacking the scroll, zoom or other common behaviours. The hijacking of scrolling pisses me off so god damn much that I've considered building Firefox from source and modifying the code to completely eliminate a website's ability to set the scroll position.[0] Front end devs, I implore you. Stop acting like you think you know what the user wants in regards to scrolling behavior . Smooth scrol…

> And disabling zooming?

I had a weird experience with Google Groups recently - I zoomed in because the text was too small and ... the page resized the viewport to its original pixel size even though the font was scaling. Ended up with about 10 characters in an unscrollable viewport. HILARIOUS.

Re: The ideal viewport doesn't exist

#115

Post by [deleted] »

5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #15

> "The main point we’re trying to get across is that you simply do not know how users are going to visit your website or web app. Instead of making design decisions on strict, limited breakpoints, keep in mind the sheer amount of fragmentation there is in viewports." I don't know how useful this is. setting breakpoints allows some sanity in the build and testing process otherwise you have an infinite scope for issues…

[deleted]

Re: The ideal viewport doesn't exist

#116

Post by paulddraper »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #93
5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #15

> "The main point we’re trying to get across is that you simply do not know how users are going to visit your website or web app. Instead of making design decisions on strict, limited breakpoints, keep in mind the sheer amount of fragmentation there is in viewports." I don't know how useful this is. setting breakpoints allows some sanity in the build and testing process otherwise you have an infinite scope for issues…

> and dont do stuff like hijacking the scroll, zoom or other common behaviours. The hijacking of scrolling pisses me off so god damn much that I've considered building Firefox from source and modifying the code to completely eliminate a website's ability to set the scroll position.[0] Front end devs, I implore you. Stop acting like you think you know what the user wants in regards to scrolling behavior . Smooth scrol…

> And disabling zooming? WHO EVEN DECIDED THAT WEBSITES SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO DO THIS?!

Applications such as maps, image editors, presentations, and flowcharts benefit from having control over zoom. (And you'll notice that almost every one of them does.)

This of course is only one difference of many between "documents" and "applications" and the web is being used for both.

Re: The ideal viewport doesn't exist

#117

Post by shadowgovt »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #93
5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #15

> "The main point we’re trying to get across is that you simply do not know how users are going to visit your website or web app. Instead of making design decisions on strict, limited breakpoints, keep in mind the sheer amount of fragmentation there is in viewports." I don't know how useful this is. setting breakpoints allows some sanity in the build and testing process otherwise you have an infinite scope for issues…

> and dont do stuff like hijacking the scroll, zoom or other common behaviours. The hijacking of scrolling pisses me off so god damn much that I've considered building Firefox from source and modifying the code to completely eliminate a website's ability to set the scroll position.[0] Front end devs, I implore you. Stop acting like you think you know what the user wants in regards to scrolling behavior . Smooth scrol…

> The hijacking of scrolling pisses me off so god damn much that I've considered building Firefox from source and modifying the code to completely eliminate a website's ability to set the scroll position.[0]

That'll break just about every cloud logging UI I'm aware of, but what you do to your own UA is your business.

Re: The ideal viewport doesn't exist

#118

Post by aidenn0 »

Android app authors ought to read this too. I recently had an android app where the button on one screen was past the bottom of my screen and it wasn't scrollable. I went to report the bug and someone else had already reported it.

Given that the workaround was to set the system font-size small enough that the button would appear back on the screen, this would also be an accessibility problem for those who have their font-size set larger, even if their screen would be normally large enough to display it.

Re: The ideal viewport doesn't exist

#119

Post by _jal »

paulddraper wrote: post #116
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and dont do stuff like hijacking the scroll, zoom or other common behaviours. The hijacking of scrolling pisses me off so god damn much that I've considered building Firefox from source and modifying the code to completely eliminate a website's ability to set the scroll position.[0] Front end devs, I implore you. Stop acting like you think you know what the user wants in regards to scrolling behavior . Smooth scrol…

> And disabling zooming? WHO EVEN DECIDED THAT WEBSITES SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO DO THIS?! Applications such as maps, image editors, presentations, and flowcharts benefit from having control over zoom. (And you'll notice that almost every one of them does.) This of course is only one difference of many between "documents" and "applications" and the web is being used for both.

Maps drive me fucking nuts, taking over zoom. As do nearly every other app that does it. They think they know what's good for me, and they don't, and it leads to me using them less. Yes, paper maps just work better for me a lot of the time.

The only thing maps.app or Google maps are good for are finding places to spend money or driving to places to spend money. If you have any other spatial interests, they're almost pointless.

I would happily run a build that removes this capability.

Re: The ideal viewport doesn't exist

#120

Post by aidenn0 »

zimpenfish wrote: post #114
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and dont do stuff like hijacking the scroll, zoom or other common behaviours. The hijacking of scrolling pisses me off so god damn much that I've considered building Firefox from source and modifying the code to completely eliminate a website's ability to set the scroll position.[0] Front end devs, I implore you. Stop acting like you think you know what the user wants in regards to scrolling behavior . Smooth scrol…

> And disabling zooming? I had a weird experience with Google Groups recently - I zoomed in because the text was too small and ... the page resized the viewport to its original pixel size even though the font was scaling. Ended up with about 10 characters in an unscrollable viewport. HILARIOUS.

I had the opposite problem with a web page the other day. When I zoomed in, the text resized itself to still fit the same amount of text in the viewport, but since other elements would zoom correctly, the more I zoomed in, the smaller the text got.
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